UK/USA
Feature Film | Comedy-Drama | English | 1h49m
Dir: Nicholas Hytner | Scr: Alan Bennett | Play: Alan Bennett | DP: Andrew Dunn | Prod: Nicholas Hytner, Damian Jones, & Kevin Loader | Mus: George Fenton | Ed: John Wilson | PD: John Beard
Cast: Samuel Anderson, James Corden, Stephen Campbell Moore, Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Andrew Knott, Russell Tovey, Jamie Parker, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, Sacha Dhawan, Clive Merrison
Capsule review | 168 words | 05/09/11
Though generally diverting enough, with sporadic moments of brilliance, Hynter’s film is ultimately rather disappointing. The fact that it is an adaptation of an Alan Bennett play, adapted by the great man himself, from whom we have come to expect much greater things, only goes to compound our disappointment. His screenplay – following the progress of eight Yorkshire grammar school pupils, under the tutelage of a pair of ideologically opposed teachers in 1980s Sheffield, as they study for their Oxbridge exams – is perhaps its biggest weakness, filled as it is with dialogue, characterisations, and situations that ring fantastically untrue, in which everyone is supremely tolerant and enlightened and without bigotries or prejudices. Similarly, Hynter’s direction – filled with unneeded and ungainly camera movements, resulting (perhaps) from his determination for the film to avoid accusations of theatricality – is also a little lacking at times. The performances, however, are generally likable, if not exactly particularly accomplished, though Griffiths’s turn does prove affecting. Disappointing, then, but still watchable enough given the right mood.
1000 Nights in the Dark: a collection of reviews of the single sentence, capsule, short, medium, and long variety, varying in length from fifty to a thousand-plus words, documenting my personal, exploratory journey through cinephilia.
